Tag Archives: Alan Moore

#4: Watchmen, Alan Moore & Dave Gibbons

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Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’ Watchmen is certainly no stranger to “best of” lists. In 2008, Entertainment Weekly looked across the entire landscape of book publishing—fiction and non-fiction, prose efforts and comics works—and put together a ranked list of the “100 Best Reads from 1983 to 2008.” (Click here.) Watchmen was listed at #13, which included it among the top ten works of fiction of the period. And a few years earlier, in 2005, Time magazine included Watchmen in its list of the 100 best English-language novels between 1923 and 2005. (Click here.) Time is an establishment publication, and it is certainly not prone to any radical pronouncement. The magazine put Watchmen in the company of such classics as The Great Gatsby, To the Lighthouse, and The Sound and the Fury. The book’s more contemporary peers included Beloved, American Pastoral, and Never Let Me Go. No other comics work was given this distinction.

When one reads Watchmen, whatever skepticism one has about such acclaim quickly falls away. It is a superb work that triumphs on multiple levels. Watchmen is simultaneously a first-rate adventure story, an incisive analysis of the superhero genre, and a brilliant meditation on how one’s sense of reality is defined by one’s perspective—knowledge and ignorance, hopes and fears, predispositions and agendas.

The book’s starting point is a mystery plot. The Comedian, a former costumed hero and now a covert government operative, is brutally murdered. It gradually becomes clear his murder is part of a larger conspiracy. Dr. Manhattan, the only one of the heroes with superpowers—and he is nearly omnipotent—is driven away from society by an elaborate smear. Rorschach, the last of the heroes to operate without government sanction, is framed for murder, captured, and imprisoned. Ozymandias, who retired from adventuring years earlier, foils a gunman’s attempt on his life. Someone is out to eliminate the heroes, but who, and why?

The answer turns out to be horribly ironic, with the reasons a black joke on the puny, naively idealistic desire to make a better world by putting on a costume and beating up criminals. The conspiracy to eliminate the costumed heroes is revealed as a tangent in a greater plot that changes the world. Along the way, Moore and Gibbons treat the reader to one terrific suspense setpiece after another. And in marked contrast to Zack Snyder, the director of the horrid film adaptation, they understand that violence is made all the more effective by restraint.

One of the most common observations about Watchmen is that it is both a superhero adventure story and a critique of the genre. In the appreciation of the book he sent with his top-ten list, Francis DiMenno identifies this with critic Harold Bloom’s theory of the “anxiety of influence.” In DiMenno’s view, Alan Moore, the book’s scriptwriter and acknowledged mastermind, has such a relationship with the superhero genre. One can see his point, but I’m more inclined to identify Watchmen’s anxiety of influence with Harvey Kurtzman’s “Superduperman” and other superhero parodies in MAD. The theory argues that a younger artist feels belated relative to older ones whose work is admired. The only way to compete with the older work—and assert one’s own artistic identity—is to beat the earlier artist at his or her own game, which is accomplished by changing the rules. In works like “Superduperman,” Harvey Kurtzman exposed the fallacies of the genre with derision and exaggeration. In contrast, Moore, who acknowledges a large debt to Kurtzman, examines his own superhero characters with the acute eye of a first-rate prose novelist. He doesn’t mock them; he plays things entirely straight, and he presents the fanciful characters in as ruthlessly realistic a manner as possible. He reveals the grotesquely maladjusted attitudes that motivate the various superheroes, turning them into figures of pathos and horror. Rorschach, Dr. Manhattan, and the others are among the most memorable characters in contemporary fiction.

Watchmen is an extraordinarily compelling read, but what makes it an extraordinarily compelling reread is its meditation on perspective and how it shapes one’s understanding. On its most profound level, the book is about interpretation and the act of reading itself. The work’s defining metaphor is the Rorschach blot—a psychiatric tool for teasing out a person’s attitudes and preoccupations. One is asked to look at a blob of ink and elaborate the associations and thoughts one projects onto it. One sees permutations of this throughout the book, such as when Dr. Manhattan, Ozymandias, and a third hero, Nite Owl, attend the Comedian’s funeral. They think back on him during the service, and it’s clear none had any significant relationship with him; they only see him as a metonymy for their own anxieties. Moore and Gibbons also dramatize the most extreme perspectives; in one chapter we are shown experience through the eyes of a psychopath, and in other we see things through the eyes of eternity, and understand what it can mean to be aware of all times at once. The book almost always presents knowledge as incomplete. And when it is complete, it is skewed by other factors, so people fail to reach the correct conclusions. In one of the book’s subplots, the main female character knows everything necessary to recognize a certain man is her real father, but her dysfunctional relationship with her mother so distorts her view that she can’t see it. And misunderstandings not only affect one’s personal life, they direct the tide of history. At the end of the book, the world has changed because everyone misinterprets a catastrophe. Will they accept the truth once they are told it? The book ends on that question, and one is inclined to answer no.

Moore and Gibbons extend their treatment of interpretation and misinterpretation to the reader’s experience of the book. If one has read Watchmen before, go back and reread the first chapter. Details that seemed extraneous the first time around jump out at one. Others, such as the recurring image of the spattered smiley face, recede into the background. Dialogues take on a different meaning, such as the conversation between the two detectives in the opening scene. Is one sincere when he says a certain crime was probably random and not worth much investigation? Or consider this panel:

How was this image interpreted—i.e. what meaning was projected onto it—the first time around? Was the emotional resonance from an earlier scene with the Nite Owl character brought over to it? Did one see it as a pensive moment of doubt on Ozymandias’ part about how he has spent his life? Were the dolls in the foreground seen as a trope for this doubt? And how is it interpreted on the second reading, with knowledge of the entire book? Does one now see Ozymandias contemplating an unexpected problem, with the toys a trope for his distraction? This panel, like all of them, is a Rorschach blot for the reader; one sees what one projects onto it. The differing interpretations also bring to mind a quote Alan Moore was fond of in a later work, “Everything must be considered with its context, words, or facts.”

Illustrator Dave Gibbons does a magnificent job of realizing his collaborator’s vision. Moore may be the mind behind Watchmen, but Gibbons is its extraordinarily deft hands. He was a seasoned adventure cartoonist when he began the project, and one sees his assurance in every panel. He handles the quiet scenes as effectively as the violent ones. There’s also an understated, almost laconic quality to his dramatization of the characters. He shows the reader what is happening; one is never told what to think about it. And the remarkable literalness of his style—clear compositions, fully realized deep-space perspectives, copious detail—is perfect for a work that at its core is about the unreliability of perception. Gibbons shows the reader everything, and it remains ambiguous anyway.

I could go on and on about the book. It does what the most impressive ones do; it makes you want to talk about its achievements forever. That’s why it deserves to be considered one of the finest novels of our era. Not to mention one of the best comics.

Robert Stanley Martin is the organizer and editor of the International Best Comics Poll. He writes for his own website, Pol Culture, and is a contributing writer to The Hooded Utilitarian. He has previously written on comics for the Detroit Metro Times and The Comics Journal.

NOTES

Watchmen, by Alan Moore & Dave Gibbons, received 31 votes.

The poll participants who included it in their top ten are: J.T. Barbarese, Piet Beerends, Eric Berlatsky, Noah Berlatsky, Alex Boney, Scott Chantler, Tom Crippen, Marco D’Angelo, Francis DiMenno, Anja Flower, Jason Green, Patrick Grzanka, Paul Gulacy, Alex Hoffman, Mike Hunter, John MacLeod, Scott Marshall, Robert Stanley Martin, Todd Munson, Jim Ottaviani, Marco Pellitteri, Michael Pemberton, Charles Reece, Giorgio Salati, M. Sauter, Matthew J. Smith, Nick Sousanis, Joshua Ray Stephens, Ty Templeton, Matt Thorn, and Qiana J. Whitted.

Watchmen was originally published as a 12-issue serial in comic-book pamphlet form in 1986 and 1987. The serial was collected and published as a graphic novel in 1987, and has been a mainstay of book retailers ever since. It should also be available at most public libraries.

–Robert Stanley Martin

Best Comics Poll Index

The Roundtable Has Pants: Garooga

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Greetings, Hooded Utilitarians. My name is Casey Rae-Hunter, and I’m a so-and-so who lives in Washington, DC. Both personally and professionally, my karma sees to it that I wrangle with issues at the intersection of creativity, policy and technology. I also wear pants, which have been known to have years, and vice versa.

It is my sincere hope that my twaddle in no way corrupts my fellow roundtablers’ insights and illuminations. And if it does, I can only offer a heartfelt GAROOGA!

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The Grammar Lesson

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A portion of the following essay was originally posted to this site, in modified form, as part of its Muck-Encrusted Mockery of a Roundtable, on April 15, 2010. Particular thanks go to Robert Stanley Martin for his valuable comments on that prior incarnation.

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“If I have any real talent at all in comic writing, that talent is probably the talent for collaboration.”

– Alan Moore to George Khoury, The Extraordinary Works of Alan Moore

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I blame this post on Jesus.

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Through Space, Through Time: Four Dimensional Perspective and the Comics by Eric Berlatsky

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Originally presented: Panel on Frames and Ways of Seeing in Modernist Narrative at The Tenth Annual Modernist Studies Association (MSA) Conference, Nashville, TN, November 2008.

Author’s introduction (“disclaimer”)

This paper was presented at the Modernist Studies Association conference two years ago. As such, the audience for the talk was not comics scholars, or, even, necessarily people who were interesed in comics. The paper is pitched to that audience and therefore says quite a number of things about comics that are fairly obvious to the comics scholar (or even just the perceptive comics reader). In fact, it even says things I know to be debatable, and even incorrect, since those things weren’t my primary concern. So, yes, I know that “The Yellow Kid” isn’t the first comic strip in U.S. newspapers (to say nothing of the world at large), but since splitting those hairs wasn’t the point of the paper, I used that as a generally “known” reference point.

I was invited to participate in a panel on “frames and ways of seeing in modernist narrative” after one of the participants in the original panel dropped out. As I recall, all three of the original panelists were from the University of Toronto, studying under/with noted modernist scholar, Melba Cuddy-Keane. Cuddy-Keane got in touch with my dissertation advisor at University of Maryland, Brian Richardson, and asked if he knew anyone interested in frame narration and modernism. Brian got in touch with me, recalling a paper I had written for him many years previous as a graduate student. That paper, however, was already forthcoming in Narrative, and I wasn’t really interested in recycling the material. So, I took the opportunity to apply some of the research I was doing on time, modernism, and comics and to write some of that out, rather than merely having it bounce around in my head. All of this is the long way of saying that the paper was even more rushed and “tossed off” than the typical conference paper, since I was a late addition to the program. At this point, I feel as if there may be nothing particularly revelatory here, as much of this material feels (to me, anyway) as if it’s fairly obvious and straightforward and covered elsewhere in the literature. Since this is a blog (my brother’s no less), I don’t feel quite so guilty about letting it see the light of day, as long as nobody really feels like it reflects the care I generally take in my scholarship. Things that make me cringe a bit, are… a) sources cited, but no bibliography listed. The sources are mentioned, for the most part, in the paper itself, but obviously, a bibliography should be included. Since I was only reading it out loud at the time, however, and I knew the sources, I never typed them up. (At this point, this note may be taking longer than it would take to type the sources… but let’s not ruin a fairly boring and mediocre story). 2) The paper also includes various notes to myself telling me to elaborate on this point or that orally. Obviously, for written publication, I should turn those into more coherent written claims… but I’m just writing a disclaimer instead. [Many of these were references to the images, so I’ve replaced them with “See Fig. X” reference. -ed.] 3) The quality of the scans is sometimes pretty bad, as well. My scanner is just an 8 x 11 and some of my sources were much bigger. I should have gone to the Artist Formerly Known as Kinko’s and done the scans on a larger printer to get things right… but, again, I reveal the generally slipshod nature of my efforts on this particular piece. All of this is why I told Noah and Derik that they could have this conference paper if they wanted it… but that I was generally unsure of its “ready for prime time” (using the term loosely) status. Derik and Noah decided to run it anyway (making me think that they reall need more submissions for this feature [We do! Send us something -ed.]), so, here it is “warts and all.”

“Through Space, Through Time:” Four Dimensional Perspective and the Comics by Eric Berlatsky

Whether pamphlet-form comic books, cramped newspaper comic strips, or more traditionally codex-form “graphic novels,” comics have only recently started to receive serious critical attention as “art objects,” as opposed to mass culture ephemera. The biggest breakthrough in comics criticism is still undoubtedly Scott McCloud’s 1993 book Understanding Comics, a book that makes a bold play for considering comics as “art,” by bypassing the typical starting date for its history. The standard date, particularly in America, is, of course, 1895, marking the beginning of R. F. Outcault’s Hogan’s Alley as a newspaper comics page in The New York World. This date, would, of course, place the origins of the newspaper comic strip in close chronological proximity to the “high art” development of modernism. However, McCloud’s choice to define comics as “sequential art,” or, in the longer version, “juxtaposed pictorial and other images in deliberate sequence,” allows him to include pre-Columbian picture manuscripts, the Bayeux tapestry, Egyptian painting, Trajan’s column, and Hogarth’s “Harlot’s Progress” as comics, along with other, more likely, suspects, like Rodolphe Topfer’s “picture stories” of the mid-nineteenth century (McCloud 10-17). McCloud discards some of the elements of earlier definitions of comics in order to detach the era of comics’ increasing popularity (the twentieth century) from its definition, suggesting that some of the greatest achievements of older “high art” are, in fact, comics. While this has the potential to raise the culture caché of comics as a medium, it also obscures the ways in which the form reflects and takes part in the modernist project and the advent of modernity.

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Dirty Hippies Who Don’t Read Batman

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Fucking freak.

In case you missed it (as I did) Alan Moore gave a big interview a little bit ago to Bleeding Cool in which he talked about Watchmen and how he’s going to refuse to speak to various other of his collaborators because he’s a crank and, oh, incidentally, DC comics is run by what we would call disease-ridden rodents if doing so would not get us sued for defamation by capybaras with head colds.

As I said, I missed the interview, and didn’t actually read it in full until just now because, (a) I already knew that Alan Moore was a crank, and (b) I already knew that DC comics was a cess pit. So I felt I had the gist.

However, it turns out others saw some novelty there. Specifically, Tom Spurgeon has a really excellent discussion on his site.

So let me suggest that anyone that just throws their hands up and says “Oh, that Alan Moore is crazy” isn’t just operating from a dubious moral position, they don’t know their history. Forget 25 years of Watchmen shenanigans for a second. If I had had just the experience Alan Moore had with ABC, where I had this giant, multi-pronged project with a publisher not DC in part because they were not DC and then found out one day when I felt I was too far along to back out without screwing over all my friends that my projects were part of a big sale to DC, I would suspect that company of bugging my phone and poisoning my water. If I had had the subsequent experience of being promised certain protections from aspects of DC editorial and then that falling through in absolutely pathetic and super-aggravating fashion over the stupidest of nonsense, I wouldn’t trust them to keep their word on a single damn thing. And that’s just one set of experiences for Moore when it comes to DC. People get more worked up in many industries when someone bogarts their parking space or makes them turn down a paid-for week in Disney World than Moore does here about 25 years of systemic dickery.

Then, in response, T. Campbell argued that Alan Moore should be mocked.

I agree that throwing up our hands and saying “Alan Moore is crazy” does a disservice to Moore, and much more importantly, to the issues raised in his interview and the meta-issue of how a creative person should conduct himself in public. Unfortunately, that denies him the insanity defense, which could be a useful excuse when he airily dismisses both his old friends (ex-friends?) and every comics writer in the new generation, whose work he hasn’t read.

Your argument that other people are crankier with less justification seems a bit desperate. Other people are serial ax murderers; that doesn’t mean we need to set the bar of acceptable behavior low enough to make one-time-only murder okay. Yes, we have all had bad-tempered moments, but the reason comics people care about Moore’s behavior in the first place is that his talent and career have made him a role model. And when role models fail, we should pay attention, because what happened to them could happen to us.

No one’s even mentioned that Moore has also airily dismissed the entire medium of film, several times, but oh it turns out he really just meant all the films that are playing now, which he hasn’t seen, and please won’t you watch his new film project which gets it all right?

Campbell also says:

I’ve never entirely understood the comics community’s addiction to tales of corporate betrayal. When an boulder doesn’t fall on you immediately, but waits for a few minutes and then falls on you, is that a “betrayal?” Because it seems to me that corporations in general don’t have a set of values to betray. They like money. That’s all there is to it. They pursue ethical behavior when it is profitable for them to do so, and individuals at the company are sometimes moral people, but a company is about as moral as a boulder, because it is a group of people with sometimes-conflicting values and opinions brought together by common profit. The basic failure to understand this, the continued attempt to anthropomorphize companies as if they were individuals you could trust or talk to, strikes me as a common failing of the artistic imagination.

Tom Spurgeon supplies an able rebuttal, with which I pretty much agree. I wanted to point out a couple of things from a slightly different angle, though.

First of all, Campbell suggests that Alan Moore is crazy. His primary evidence for this is that Moore dismisses old friends, dimisses comics writers in the current generation whose work he hasn’t read, and dismisses today’s films without having seen many of them. This is not how a “creative person should conduct himself in public.”

One does wonder which creative persons Campbell is thinking about precisely. Not Kanye West or David Boreanaz, I take it — or even Lady Gaga, presumably. Really, is there anybody out there who expects creative people to be beacons of propriety? I thought the expectation was that, on the contrary, creative people would be unpredictable and sometimes not especially nice, what with the driving ambition and the money and the fame and all. Hasn’t Campbell ever seen Behind the Music?

Anyway, while he’s no Varg Vikernes, it’s true that in his own small way Moore is a crank, and from all appearances a very difficult person to deal with. He believes he’s an actual wizard, for goodness sake. His habit of dropping friends is infamous, and he talks smack about his co-creators in public like he’s a rock star rather than a comic book writer. He lived in a polyamorous relationship for some time, and he writes underage pornography and even uses his real name while doing it. He’s a big, dirty hippie with a strong conviction of his own genius, and he’s a lot weirder than the average comics creator or fan. This is not news to even a small degree. In fact, I think it’s safe to say that Moore’s highly unusual career, including its very substantial achievements, probably has something to do with the fact that he comes at comics from an idiosyncratic perspective.

But — how idiosyncratic is it, really, to sneer at contemporary film without really being especially up on it? Or how weird is it to say, “comics today suck” without having read a ton of them? People do that sort of thing all the time. And there’s no reason not to, is there? If you disagree, you disagree, if you agree, you agree. He’s shooting the shit, the way most people do when they talk about art. What’s the harm?

Campbell actually explains the harm in a second post.

Bottom line: I don’t see how there is anything “reasonable” about dismissing large bodies of work, and indeed entire media, that one claims not to have consumed. I can’t help but see a parallel between that kind of closed-mindedness and the closed-mindedness that keeps many people from reading comics.

“The closed-mindedness that keeps many people from reading comics.” It’s the ultimate insidery comics insult. You’re one of *them*, Alan! One of those evil people who doesn’t want to read comics, who thinks we’re a bunch of juvenile morons who don’t know that underwear is worn on the inside! Traitor! Traitor! Traitor!

The main infraction, the “bottom line” that makes Moore not “rational” is the fact that he basically doesn’t give a shit about the stuff he’s supposed to give a shit about. He doesn’t want to read contemporary comics; he doesn’t want to go to the movies. He just wants to crankily complain about them. He’s dipped his toe in once or twice at some point, presumably, he discovered he didn’t like it, and, instead of gripping tighter and tighter in nostalgic ecstasy while searching, searching, searching for the one piece of gold amidst the variant covers, he just said “fuck it.” He’s (gasp!) not a fan. And we all know that if you’re not a fan, you must be insane. And also a bad person. QED.

What’s especially interesting about this is that Moore’s criticism of the comics industry’s practices and creativity is actually tied to fannishness as well. Moore basically argues that DC is screwing him over in substantial part because they’re not creative; they just want to keep recycling the same old properties rather than coming up with something new.

This recycling is, of course, at the center of the current mainstream comics industry. Moore has, more than anyone, shown that said recycling can actually be creative and exciting. But for all his magic, he’s never been able to convince fans of that old dictum, “it’s the singer, not the song.” The mainstream audience remains much more interested in the old moldering properties than it does in the creators who reanimate them. And mainstream companies remain much more interested in what to do next with Batman than they are with what to do next with Alan Moore.

This is why Campbell’s pragmatic ode to the unculpability of corporations rather elaborately misses the point. Tom Spurgeon points out that, “Both DC Comics and Drawn and Quarterly are companies, but one has a mixed record when it comes to how it exploits people and one has an exemplary record,” which is true, but even that’s not exactly the issue. Rather, the issue is that mainstream companies act the way they do because of their history and because of their relationship with their readers and their creators. The music industry is a bastion of nightmarish evil, but they wouldn’t have fucked over Alan Moore in the particular way DC fucked over Alan Moore because you don’t treat creative talent that way in the music industry. And you don’t treat creative talent that way because the creators are more important than any individual thing they create. Fans pay attention to the creators; they care about the creators, not the individual album or the character. Beyonce can make up an alter-ego named Sasha Fierce for one album, but no industry exec is coming along to say, you know, we’re going to take this character and have it record polkas whether you want us to or or not. They don’t do that because it would be fucking ridiculous, and fans wouldn’t stand for it. But DC does it to Alan Moore and fans not only eat it up, they sneer at the man himself when he dares to suggest that the folks they plan to get to write the polkas are soulless, talentless hacks. (Moore even seems to be dissing Grant Morrison! Sacrilege!)

Tom writes that, “I think a lot of this comes down to the fact that for whatever reason, Alan Moore didn’t conduct himself in a way that suited comics fans.” I think that’s right, and I think the reason it didn’t suit comics fans is pretty clear. Namely, it didn’t suit comics fans because Moore is declaring that he is not one of the club. Further, he is declaring that the club screwed him over. His work has been bastardized and his pocket picked precisely because of the insularity, backwardness, and lack of creativity of mainstream companies, mainstream creators, and mainstream fans.

And how do the fans reply to this accusation? By declaring — Fuck you, you dirty hippie, you don’t even read Batman, why should I care what you think? And, oh yeah, how dare you be paranoid or bitter, huh? If you can’t smile and cheer for the latest crossover, then just take your beard and your polyamory and go suck on a snake demon or something.

But, hey, leave those IPs behind when you leave, damn it. I need a Rorschach plush toy for Christmas.

Muck-Encrusted Comments

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The Swamp Thing roundtable has shambled along a bit longer than I expected, and we’re still not necessarily done. But while we’re waiting for a last post I thought I’d pull some passing thought-bubbles from the muck:

Andrei Molotiu:

if issue 20 is damage control, it’s excellent damage control, taking a narrative that had rolled up around itself and tripped on its own loose ends many times, and resolving it elegantly within one issue. Furthermore, the art (especially the use of extradiegetic elements in the frames) does things that may be at least as, if not more, interesting as anywhere else in the run. Overall, though, I think it’s more interesting to think of it–and of the entire series too–as Moore working, in a nearly Oulipian style, with a complex set of constraints: what can I do with this ridiculous, gothic backstory I’ve inherited? What can I do with the purple prose that Pasko has used to set the tone of the series? What can I do with the complex panel arrangements that by now were already a trademark of the run? This actually challenges Moore (almost never again will he work with such complex panel shapes, as it is much easier for him, as writer, to control the art if he works with a set grid), and I do think he creates the most successful work of his career. Left by himself, in total control of the stories he can tell, he ends up falling in the same rut (and that is true of “From Hell” much more than of SOST). Yes, the American Gothic stories are the weakest of the run, but I disagree about the earlier stories. And if you simply use to judge them a measuring stick of taking individual stories and setting them up against comparable sci fi or horror pieces, you are really missing the forest for the trees. Again, reading the entire run as, first of all, a conscious taking on of constraints, looking at the specific troping that Moore engages in (it’s always amazing to me, for example, that nobody ever mentions the totally obvious “Master and Margarita” reference, which is not only cute in a limited way, but connects the larger themes of the two works), and looking simultaneously at the wider ark and at individual details, pages where Moore really shows his artistry, seems to me the much more appropriate way to go.

Charles Reece:

I like your S&M analysis, Noah. I think that’s why Swamp Thing doesn’t much work as a horror comic. I’m thinking of Silence of the Lambs versus Hannibal. The latter is actually something of a superhero tale, because the audience identifies with the superpowered Lecter.

If there’s any place where the art really contributes something extra to Moore’s story, it’s in creating whatever sense of horror the book possesses. But I’m one of those horror fans who believes movies do it best. Language, particularly the purple colored, is always too abstract for the genre, and ultimately a distraction from the emotive core. Horror is perceptual, the less said, the better. We can be morally outraged by reading a description of a rape, of course, but seeing it (say, in Irreversible) is on a whole other level, regardless of how well-written the description might be. Language alone allows for more of a sense of control than being submerged in sound and vision. Does that mean language is sadistic and perception is masochistic?

And EricB:

I would say that feminism is usually part of his project–but that there are different kinds of feminism and they don’t always get along. His “second wave” feminism–appreciation of, and celebration of, stereotypically feminine “values,” may lead to a lot of stereotyping (as you note here). He’s a self-conscious valuer of “feminine” principles—but this means defining some kind of “essential” version of gender, which is less comfortable for both first wave and third wave feminist thinkers. It can also come across as somewhat condescending coming from a man. Balloon-breasted castrating hawk ladies are not the high point of the series in terms of its representation of gender. I’m not sure it means Moore isn’t being “thoughtful” necessarily though– Strange’s idiotic blasting away at Swampy is clearly a critique of “typically masculine” behavior–The problem here is often in how the “typically” bleeds a bit too much into the “stereotypically.”

The immensely overwritten, but still kind of fascinating, “loving the alien” issue is more self-conscious in its manipulation of overly familiar tropes. There, the “mother” is machine, not Earth, is rapist, not potential victim–and Swampy (the man) has to take the stereotypically feminine position as rape victim–as “nature” being tilled by industry. It’s all a bit on the obvious side, I guess–except for its reversal of genders–”she” becomes the machine-like industrial rapist, and “he” becomes the “earthy” mother figure–even though neither of them, strictly speaking, is gendered at all (at least not in any traditional human way)–since one is a swamp monster, without functioning reproductive parts–and the other is a planet/machine.
Swampy himself vacillates between being a “feminine” “mother earth” figure–and a masculine foil to Abby.

So though we’re not quite gone, I’ll take this opportunity to thank all who read, participated and commented, and especially to our guest posters Jog and EricB (also known as my brother.) It’s been great fun — and not quite done yet!

Muck-Encrusted Mockery of a Phallus

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In his post, Eric argued that Moore’s Swamp Thing is feminist, both because it presents Abby as a strong, heroic figure and because it critiques Swamp Thing’s own abusive use of patriarchal power.

I agree with Eric that power and gender are both important themes in the Swamp Thing series. I’m less certain that Moore always manages to be especially thoughtful about them, though. It seems to me, on the contrary, that in the marriage between Moore and his tropes, it’s as often the green, lumpy pulp that wears the jeans in the relationship as it is the feminism.

Having brutally murdered that innocent metaphor…I thought I’d look back at the same issues I discussed in my first post — the two-part story in which Swamp Thing goes to Rann.

This story is built around doubled couples: Swamp Thing, in exile from earth and Abby, is mirrored by Adam Strange, who is in a constant vacillating exile from Rann and his wife, Alanna. In both of these pairings, the male/female roles are apportioned in familiar manner. Swamp Thing and Adam are the seekers, questing across space, engaging in feats of daring-do, in order to return to hearth and home embodied by Abby/Alanna. Female means stability and civilization; male means adventure and rough virility. Moore is careful to tell us that the people of Rann are hairless, and that they see Adam as a kind of atavistic hairy monster. Alanna, then, is a (literally) smooth, perfect, (literal) princess in a tower; a fairy tale dream — just as Abby is referred to as a “Hans Anderson princess” at the very end of Moore’s run on the series.

Moore, moreover, links his males questing nobly for the womb explicitly to phalluses and sperm. There’s one sequence where Swamp Thing gets transformed into a bulbous member spouting suggestive liquid…and look at that caption.

“Her cries like a panther’s” indeed.

Of course, that same page we’ve got Adam with that ridiculous headgear holding his smoking gun at crotch level. After that, it’s almost (ahem) anti-climactic when Swampy uses his powers to refertilize Rann…or when we learn that Adam has been brought to Rann because the “fierce vitality” of his sperm is needed to impregnate Alanna on a world where all the men are apparently sterile.

The person talking all up in Adam’s fierce virility is not his wife, but rather Keela Roo, a Thanagarian hawk warrior. Keela Roo is a very different kind of feminine. Instead of waiting at home in a castle, she sallies forth in spikes and skin and fetish boots. She wears a big flamboyant headress that stands in stark contrast to her male-subordinates unadorned helmet. She is, in short, a dominatrix and a castrating bitch; vital, animal, sexy, and unhealthily virile. Here, for example, she goes after Swampy by inserting her big phallic weapon into his split and oozing orifice.

As is generally the case in these pulp narratives, the dark queen is scary, but she’s also attractive — not least because she actually has a personality. Abby doesn’t exist (in these issues) except as a name and a desire. Alanna never speaks in English, and though her Rannian dialect isn’t entirely opaque,and though we do get to see her desire for Adam, keeping her voice from the reader effectively makes her seem distant, exotic, mysterious, soft-spoken, and unattainable. The princess in the tower again.

Keela Roo, on the other hand, has a universal translator thingee — she wants you to know what she thinks. Language is something she has mastered, and she uses it seductively. Several scenes between her and Adam have a not-very-subliminal sexual subtext. Here she is wearing that preposterous outfit while Adam talks to her in his bathrobe:

And this next sequence is a brazen come on (with Adam in a bathrobe again. Doesn’t he ever get dressed?)

That “aid proposal” seems very like a euphemism for another kind of proposal, especially as we’re getting a shot down her cleavage.

Keela Roo tells Adam, “We are both fighters,” and she’s right of course. The problem is that she’s the wrong kind of fighter. She’s a twisted fighter, a perverted fighter — in short, a cross-dressing, feminine kind of fighter, when the right kind of fighter is a male fighter.
Thus, poetic justice demands that Keela Roo be killed, not in equal combat, but by domesticity itself. In battle, she manages to kick Adam Strange’s ass, but he fools her by leading her to his home, where his household guardian water creatures disposes of her. She is, then, not merely defeated, but humiliated — her fetish mask is torn from her, stripping her faux masculinity and leaving her as just a woman after all.

In the final twist of the knife, the creature who disposes of her is itself feminine (taking the form of a cat); a liquid female personification of hearth and home, which makes short work of that other woman Adam has been dallying with so that he and Alanna can be reunited again.

The point here isn’t that Moore is an irredeemable sexist, or even that this story’s handling of gender is particularly offensive. Rather, the point is that Moore, here and elsewhere, is using tried and true genre ideas (male quests; adventure vs. home.) And his main means for dealing with those concerns are received pulp tropes or DC comics ideas. Alanna is a princess not because Alan Moore made her one, but because some old DC writer steeped in Edgar Rice Burroughs and Flash Gordon made her one; the hawk woman is dressed like that because some pulp dc writer steeped in pulp cheesecake figured why the hell not.

Moore takes these ideas and runs with them…but though he runs pretty far, he doesn’t necessarily run to a different planet. In space opera, good women are beautiful paragons who sit at home being good and nurturing; bad women are aggressive and dominant and get killed off despite (or because of) their appeal. And that’s the way it is in Moore’s space opera as well.

Eric argues that at the end of the series, Moore undermines standard pulp narratives about revenge, domestic bliss and male power. But to me at least, reading back through some of these stories, Moore’s use of pulp in Swamp Thing seems less like undermining and more like assiduously and inventively cultivating.
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You can read the whole Swamp Thing roundtable here.

Jog’s massive concluding Swamp Thing blowout post will be up tomorrow.